Bain Attwood

Born and raised in New Zealand, Bain Attwood has studied, worked and lived in Australia since 1981. He was educated at the University of Waikato (BSocSc), the University of Auckland (MPhil) and La Trobe University (PhD). He joined the School of History at Monash University in 1985, was elected FAHA in 2006, and promoted to Professor in 2007. He held a senior research fellowship in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, The Australian National University, 2001−03, and a Smuts Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, 2007−08. He held the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University during 2014−15.

Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (2009); The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (2007) (with Andrew Markus); Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005); Rights for Aborigines (2003); A Life Together, a Life Apart: A History of Relations between Europeans and Aborigines (1994); The Making of the Aborigines (1989)

As editor

Frontier, Race, Nation: Henry Reynolds and the History of Australia (2009) (with Tom Griffiths); The Public Life of History, a special issue of Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 1 (2008) (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Claudio Lomnitz); Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (2003) (with S.G. Foster); Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand (2001) (with Fiona Magowan); In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia (1996); Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (1992) (with John Arnold)

Documentary collections (with Andrew Markus)

Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (2004); The Struggle for Rights for Aborigines: A Documentary Collection (1999)

Ann Curthoys has commented that ‘Popular understandings of the place of Aboriginal history in Australian history remain unsettled and deeply divided’ (2001: 5). Within the fraught arena of contact history, Attwood has created thoroughly researched but ‘very readable’ narratives that are variously described as ‘learned but accessible, quiet but forceful’, and praised for being both ‘independent and reflective’ (for example, by Mark Finnane). A Life Together, a Life Apart was greeted by Bob Reece as ‘a useful corrective to more polarised views of Aboriginal-European interaction in Australian history’ (1994: 75). Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History was one of three books nominated to The Age by prize-winning novelist Kate Grenville as having kept her reading in 2005, remarking that ‘Bain Attwood’s Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History is about understanding, not polemic. It is an excellent overview of how you may come at history and where it’s up to in Australia, in the kind of clear, cordial language we non-historians welcome.’

Sources:

Ann Curthoys, ‘Aboriginal history’, Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford University Press, 2001): 3−5; Mark Finnane, ‘Review of Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History’, The Age, 23 December 2005; Bob Reece, ‘Review of A Life Together, a Life Apart’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1994): 74−5.

The Making of the Aborigines, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, xii, 181p.

Before 1788 the indigenous peoples of the country now called Australia did not consider themselves as ‘Aborigines’. They only became the Aborigines in the wake of the British invasion. In this original study Bain Attwood revealed how the relationship between the indigenous people and the British colonisers led to a new consciousness among the indigenous people so that they came to understand themselves as members of a common group.

Substantively focussed on the colonial world created for Aborigines by Christian missionaries on Ramahyuck mission in Gippsland, Victoria, the book addresses the social and political processes associated with colonisation that created an idea of a pan-Aboriginal identity from the disparate indigenous groupings that previously occupied the country. Attwood acknowledges the shaping influence of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and Marxist historian E.P. Thompson and the latter’s notion of a group or class of people being ‘made’ by their historical experience. Aborigines were also ‘made’ in another sense, by the onslaught of missionaries and other agents of European ‘civilisation’ who sought to alter Aboriginal consciousness, and make their minds and hearts anew (Curthoys 2001: 5). Reviewer C. C. Macknight (1988: 212) found the book to be ‘beautifully written’, noting that its ‘outstanding quality … is its breadth of sympathy’. It includes numerous contemporary photographs with long, analytical captions.

This book was the co-winner of the 1990 W.K. Hancock Prize, awarded for the best first book published in 1988 and 1989 by an Australian historian; and was short-listed for the 1990 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for 1990 (A.A. Phillips Prize for Australian Studies).

In this ground-breaking work, ‘the first national history’ of its subject (McKenna 2003), Bain Attwood charted a century-long struggle for rights for Aborigines in Australia. He tracked the ever-shifting perceptions of race and history and their impact on the ideals and goals of campaigners for rights for indigenous people, considered prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners and what prompted their involvement in key incidents and movements, and investigated how they found sufficient common ground to fight together for justice and equality for Aboriginal people.

Key case studies, ordered chronologically and generously illustrated, are selected as representative of indigenous engagement with white ideas of justice, equality and fairness, and white activism, for example, Coranderrk (1870s), the 1938 Day of Mourning, the Wave Hill Strike (1966) the 1967 referendum, and the 1972 Tent Embassy. The result is a ‘radical historicisation of rights:…the rights that have been claimed by or on behalf of the Aborigines, the political and other calculations involved in the making of these claims, and how the content of these rights and the cases made for them have changed over time’ (Hindess 2004: 103).

Reviewers noted the author’s success in achieving his declared aim of finding a balance between his ‘commitment to addressing the wrongs the colonial past has bequeathed to our present’ and his belief that history is a discipline that requires ‘distancing and objectifying’ (Hindess 2004: 105; Griffiths 2004). ‘[The book] is engaged and fair-minded. It is passionate and rigorous. It is a sophisticated exploration of the relationship between experience, history and memory’ (Griffiths 2004: 10). McKenna (2003) characterised the book as ‘scholarly history in the best sense—meticulously researched, innovative and intellectually stimulating … a history of depth and subtlety that deserves to be read widely’. Nonetheless, Attwood has ‘opened a chink in liberal Western certainties’ (Genovese 2005: 248). In Chesterman’s opinion (2004: 251), two central themes make the book an important contribution to the way in which both Aboriginal history and Australian history more generally will continue to be written and conceived. ‘The first concerns the respective role played by Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists in the search for justice for Indigenous people. The second concerns the relationship between the search for civil (or equal) rights and the search for the recognition of the more radical Indigenous rights (primarily the recognition of rights to the land).’

This book won the 2004 New South Wales Premier’s History Awards’ State Records Prize, and was short-listed for the 2004 Ernest Scott Prize and the 2004 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (Best History Book Award).

In this book Bain Attwood tells the fascinating story of the only treaty made between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia. It contemplates why some white settlers, led by John Batman, forged this agreement, how the Aboriginal people understood its terms, why government repudiated it, and how whites claimed to be the rightful owners of the land. It also considers the way that settler society has endeavoured to make good its possession of the land by creating histories that have recalled or repressed the memory of Batman, the treaty, and the destruction and dispossession of the Aboriginal people, and charts how Aboriginal people have unsettled these histories through their own remembering. The book contains 89 illustrations, including full-colour reproductions of many historical paintings, whose significance is discussed.

The book is about both the treaty and the way it has been remembered. The first part consists of a ‘wonderfully nuanced and contextualised account of the treaty itself’ (Banner 2012: 210) in which the author reconstructs how the transaction of the treaty would have been understood by both parties. The book’s many illustrations particularly complement the author’s purpose in the second part, which shows how the ‘legend’ of Batman was constructed in Victoria between 1850 and 1930 and how Batman himself was depicted in paintings, lithographs and monuments. In the third part, as Aborigines re-enter colonial history in the second half of the twentieth century, memories of Batman darken and views of the treaty become more ambivalent.

This book won the 2010 Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or colonial history; the 2010 New South Wales Premier’s History Awards, Australian History Prize; and the 2010 Victorian Community History Awards 175th Anniversary Prize; and was short-listed for the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (Best History Book Award).

Educated at the University of Western Australia (1966) and Oxford University (D Phil 1969), Copland joined the staff of the School of History at Monash in 1970, where he taught until his retirement in 2009. He is now an Adjunct Professor in the History program (SOPHIS). He was elected FAHA in 2001 and promoted to Professor in 2008.

Davison completed his BA (Hons) and Dip Ed at the University of Melbourne and his PhD at ANU. He undertook a second undergraduate degree at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar for Victoria (1964). He was a member of the History Department at Melbourne University, where he taught Australia’s first course in urban history. He became Professor of History at Monash in 1982.

David Garrioch completed his first degree (BA Hons) at the University of Melbourne and his DPhil at Oxford. He joined the School of History at Monash, teaching European history, in 1984. He was elected FAHA in 2004 and promoted to Professor in 2005. He has served as Associate Dean (Teaching) in the Faculty of Arts at Monash, and been Head of the School of Historical Studies. In 2003, 2008, and again in 2012-15 he was a Visiting Fellow in the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyons in June 2005.

Andrew Markus holds the Pratt Foundation Research Chair of Jewish Civilisation. Educated at the University of Melbourne (BA Hons) and LaTrobe University (PhD), Markus came to the Monash School of History as a lecturer in 1984, specifically to fill two significant gaps in the School’s Australian history program: the histories of Aboriginal-White relations and of post-war immigration (Davison 2006: 14). He was promoted to Professor in 2001 and elected FASSA 2004.

Education: British born, Mews was educated at the universities of Auckland (BA, MA) and Oxford (DPhil). He came to Australia in 1987 and joined the staff of the School of History, after teaching for five years (1980−1985) at the Université de Paris III and spending two years as a Leverhulme research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK, working with Professor David Luscombe on editing the writings of Peter Abelard.

Marian Quartly was educated at the University of Adelaide (BA (Hons)) and Monash University (PhD). Her first teaching position was at the University of Western Australia, where Australians 1838 was begun as part of the Bicentennial History project. The book was completed at Monash University when Quartly took up a lectureship there in 1980. She remained at Monash until her retirement, as Professor Emirita, in 2006.